One of my genealogy goals for 2026 is to honor each of my direct ancestors on a day meaningful to their lives. For many, that day will be their birthday. Where there day of birth is lost to history, it is instead the day they passed. But for the majority, I know only a year for each date (if that!), and they will be sprinkled throughout the year.

Early on in this blog (2016), I wrote about my great-grandfather, Alex BLOCK, and how I came to be convinced that his birth name was Elias SCHNITZ. I could not (and cannot) explain why the change of surname was made, but it fit all the evidence.

In my previous post, I reviewed the immigration of my great-grandparents, the OCHOROWICZs (OCHOWITZ, starting about 1911) in 1904. Abe OCHOROWICZ's mother, Rachel CHAJKOWICZ OCHOROWICZ, immigrated in 1906 and stayed with her son and daughter-in-law until her death in 1917. I also wrote how I had found Rachel's brother, Chaim Ruven, and begun investigating his branch. In this entry, I will cover from a high level Chaim Ruven's six children who immigrated to the US, each a first cousin to great-grandfather Abe.

Taking a short break from the LENETSKY series, I talk today about how families intertwine. I see this a LOT on my maternal side, especially with the JACOBOWSKY / WOLFF group and other families that came from Sandberg, Prussia. This post will be about two families on my paternal side, DAVIS and RANSOM (a.k.a. REFSON / REVSON / RANSON). They are neither are related to me directly, but play important interconnected roles with my family.

In Part 1 of this series, I talked about genetic cousins descended from Boris LENETSKY, their origin in modern Ukraine (Kremenchuk and Krylov) and a little of their history in Canada and Philadelphia. Part 2 covered Boris's likely parents, Joseph and Schendel, who died in Montreal. I also covered the man I strongly believe to be Boris's brother, Louis.